PRINCETON, NJ (PRWEB) DECEMBER 18, 2012

Wharfedale Technologies’ customer is a transportation company based in Canada, which owns approximately 14,000 (22,500 km) route miles of rail-tracks all across Canada and into the United States, stretching from Montreal to Vancouver, and as far north as Edmonton. Its rail network also serves major cities in the United States, such as Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York City.

The client has utilized SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software for nearly a decade to manage its Financial and Enterprise resource operations. Over the years, the client has deployed major SAP components such as SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI), CRM, SRM, PI, EM, TM and Enterprise Portal systems. There are multiple production instances deployed across the corporation, all of these SAP instances were installed on Microsoft Windows based technologies with SQL Server as the database. The SAP landscape is hosted at a vendor data center and managed by the vendor. Increasing demand for a dynamic IT environment to support growing business needs had led the client to undertake a complex and intensive SAP data migration from the vendor hosting facilities on the legacy IT infrastructure practices to a robust high-performing environment using Vblock® based infrastructure.

The client has engaged WFT for this critical project as there are multiple landscapes involved and the production cutover downtime demanded minimum impact to the business. Challenges to this migration were as follows:

•    The vendor hosted data center (source) and the client’s target data center are in two different geographic locations. Due to network latency issues, migration of the data between these two sites using exist network connection during production cutover required long production downtime
•    Source and target database are different for certain SAP modules (SQL vs. Sybase)

To minimize the production downtime and mitigate risks during migration, WFT senior SAP BASIS team deployed various approaches using its own propriety proven migration methodology to optimize the processes and drastically shorten the production downtime by almost 50%. The team achieved this downtime reduction by following these strategies:

•    Introduced staging servers at the target storage environment to synchronize the production data throughout the testing period
•    Deployed the backup/restore option and log-shipping method from the source to the staging servers
•    Enhanced staging server configuration build with more memory and CPUs to provide high performance during migration processes
•    Compressed the database for Business Warehouse with more than 480% reduction in size.

Leveraging its deep infrastructure and SAP application knowledge, Wharfedale Technologies once again planned and carried out the SAP Application migration from the host legacy infrastructure to a Hybrid Cloud environment in an industry record time frame. The results of the migration of the client’s production landscape enabled this railroad giant with easy provisioning mechanism to its business teams, reduce cost by an estimation of 20 – 30 percent, and increase reliability and availability overall SAP solutions.

With increasing number of enterprise SAP users wanting to reduce infrastructure and operational costs, senior officials at Wharfedale Technologies believe that large-scale SAP landscape migrations as such, can be completed in shorter time periods, with the same level of efficiency and reliability in the future.

About Wharfedale Technologies Inc.
Wharfedale Technologies Inc. (WFT Cloud) is a leading technology consulting integration firm specializing in infrastructure integration in the implementation and support of virtualization and private/hybrid cloud services. As an SAP-certified provider of cloud services, it also offers the following services in support of SAP solutions: high availability, disaster recovery, advanced sizing for virtualization, back-up/recovery Integration, systems refresh automation and landscape optimization. For more information on WFT services, visit http://www.wftcloud.com or call (888) 533-3113.

SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.
All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

‍